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The Forgotten Anniversary

Michael 2 Comments

It was a week ago today we (should have) observed the 50th anniversary of man landing on the moon.  Other than one article in one magazine and a quick mention on that morning’s news, it went on with about as much notoriety as my 50th birthday. At least from my perspective. I saw no television specials, no major magazine special editions, no public service announcements, not even a “Google Doodle.”

Granted it had a lot of competition. This year’s June included the 75th anniversary of D-Day not to mention the 81st anniversary of the debut of Superman in comics. June 20 was also Ice Cream Soda Day in the United States so it is quite obvious why such a mundane event as walking on another celestial body would be overshadowed.

I guess it was fitting that the occasion was celebrated with the same excitement that most of the US space program generated among the general public. The early Mercury flights were reason for the elementary school principal to pull us out of our classes so we could watch the launches on a then large screen (15 inch!) TV in the auditorium. But by the time Aurora 7 launched with the fourth manned Mercury mission (and the first after Friendship 7 carried John Glenn three full orbits around the earth), long division took precedence. Likewise with Gemini. I remember Ed White’s first space walk on Gemini IV and vaguely recall the rendezvous maneuvers of Geminis VIa and VII and Gemini VIII’s docking with the unmanned Agena but what happened going through Gemini XII is as much a mystery to me as what happened to my short term memory. By the time the Apollo missions began I was I heading off to high school where we got time off for nothing. What I remember of the moon missions I read or saw on my own time and the only ones that stand out are the disastrous launch pad fire in Apollo 1 taking the lives of Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, Apollo 8 and the first manned flight to orbit the moon, and the Apollo 11 moon landing. I remember Apollo 10 only because I was and still am a big Peanuts fan (look it up), Apollo 13 after the fact because of the movie, and Apollo 17 because it was the last. What happened in those flights must not have been enough to impress a teenage boy intent on testing for his down to earth driving license. After that Skylab came and went, the Space Shuttles were interesting while they were operational, and the only time I think of the International Space Station is…um, almost never. There you have it. An average American’s review of the American space program.

According to a NASA database of all things that ultimately made their way to the non-NASA universe, Project Apollo alone accounted for over 1800 products and applications. The US space program is credited with the development of radial tires, scratch resistant eyeglass lenses, powdered lubricants, solar power cells, freeze dried food, memory foam, and computer mouses (mice?). In the medical works we saw advances in imaging including MRIs and CT scans, the LVAD cardiac assist device, improved prosthetic devices, the temporal thermometer (that thermometer they touch to your forehead to measure your body temperature), and even LASIK surgery. All from a forgotten program.

Because you probably didn’t do anything last week, sometime today when you slip on your sunglasses or sink your comfy foam filled recliner, remember you get to do those because of the contributions of the men in space and those who supported them, and that crowing achievement of June 20, 1969, man’s first step on anywhere not Earth. Happy belated anniversary Neil, Buzz, and Mike.

2019-06-27 12.06.16

 

Technologically Repressed

Michael 5 Comments

We’ve talked tech before. I’ve even admitted that I’m fine with many of the advancing technologies we have and continue to come up with, but there are a couple things I wish we hadn’t invented. Or at least not gone for in such a big way.

This really all started with a conversation I had with my daughter, a not quite 30 year old who makes her living only because we have tech-evolved as much as we have yet still hangs on to these few things from my past.

PDA devices and apps versus planners/calendars.

Planners are called planners because that’s what they do. They plan. Or help you plan.

This is what started our conversation. When I was discharged from the hospital I was sent on my way with home nursing and physical and occupational therapies. I had gotten off the phone with one of the home care givers and trying to sort out who was coming when. I had everybody’s visits, along with doctors’ appointments and dialysis sessions loaded into my electronic scheduler and that synced with my Amazon Echo to remind me each morning what was happening that day. (I told you I was okay with some new tech.) But it was only after I opened the actual calendar looking page of the calendar wannabe program did I realize that I had all three disciplines coming the same day and a total of 5 commitments over two days. My “assistant” gladly accepted the suggested dates and times knowing there were not overlaps but didn’t warn me of not only adjacent scheduling but of overwhelming (for me) scheduling. My daughter reminded me if I just used a book style planner or at least a page out of a calendar I could have seen at a glance that I was getting in too deep for the middle of the week. I would have sent her to bed without her supper but it is her house and she was cooking.

The point is, there are some things a calendar does better than all the electronic schedulers out there. Hung on a wall with nice big squares for each day, a calendar is still the best guarantee to efficient planning.

GPS versus an atlas or paper maps

No argument that for getting from Point A to Point B celestial guidance is the way to go. But when you want to know just where those points are in this great big world or what’s at Point A1, A2, and so forth, start unfolding that paper.

Anybody who uses GPS for directions for any appreciable time will run into problems. By problems I mean lost. Undocumented construction, flooded roads, accident clean up crews, or over height semis wedged in tunnel entrances or under overpasses turn Little Miss Turn By Turn into a one phrase wonder – recalculating, recalculating, recalculating.

Am I the only one who wonders after making a turn and hearing “travel north for 8 and 1/2 miles” to the next turn what I’m missing in those 8 and 1/2 miles? The on screen “map” clearly displays the traveled road in all its exact scale-ness but nothing around it. No town names, no points of interest, no “world’s largest ball of twine!” a mere hope skip, and jump at the third intersection to the right.

There is no better way to getting un-lost than to pull out an old fashioned map and see what landmarks are nearby or road names or route numbers that look familiar. Those same maps display a bounty of options that go around those unexpected obstacles. Only with maps can you take in the whole picture of the places around you.

Keep that GPS app on your phone. It has its place. This is a big country connected by oodles of 8 and 1/2 mile stretches. Some of them are pretty interesting places but sometimes you have to get off the the highlighted route to find them.

Music downloads versus LPs, CDs, even cassette tapes

I get it. You like a song, you want a song, you buy a song. No muss, no fuss, no waste. And no experimenting with songs from a the B Side. Not to mention all the great stuff on an album that never gets air time…if you can still call where they play “air.”

Beyond the songs that go unheard are the stories you found on the printed material – the album jackets and the CD inserts. If the songs of an album told a story, the liner notes painted the picture. Sometimes with a collage of real pictures. (You remember pictures. They are those things you call “images” but you don’t need a phone to see.) Often the notes even included the lyrics so there was never an excuse for belting out “Welcome to the land of flaming sex!” at a red light.

News sites verses newspapers

Printing material is expensive. Delivering printed material is expensive. Recycling printed material is sometimes more work than I really care to do. Still I’d rather pay for and read a paper held in my hands (on spread across the table) than read an article on line. Why?

I’m not so stuck in the old ways that I’ll say I prefer a real paper because “I like the feel of it in my hands” although that argument might work with books. I prefer the paper because I get more news out of it. Think of this. You get your “paper” on line probably through an morning email that says today’s “paper” is out there along with a handful of headlines with the articles’ first few sentences. So you scan those, see a few that are interesting and check them out. You read that one article led by whomever wrote the morning email and you click your way back to the email to maybe read one or two more in the came fashion. If you see that same headline on hard copy, you notice it, you read it, you follow the article to its “continued on page,” where you notice another headline or maybe a picture that looks interesting or complements the article you just finished. You read that one and the pattern continues. Soon you are turning pages, reading commentaries, arguing with letters to the editor, laughing at the comics, not believing the comeback the home team made in the 11th inning.

People who says “I can get all the news on line” might but never really do. What news they read is often because somebody else decided that was the news they should read.

 

So there you have it. My wishes for things that wouldn’t go away. Not because I’m old and set in my ways even though I am old and can be set in my ways, but because they are just plain better. Because I say so is why. Sheesh. Kids today!

 

Summer Eve

Michael 2 Comments

Friday is the first day of summer here. Actually it’s the first day of summer everywhere north of 0° latitude and points south of there will see the first day of winter. Either way the day will usher in a change of seasons. If you are reading this while standing on the equator please step one way or the other and join us. Thank you.

Okay, from this point I’d written another few hundred words on how like the seasons my life has changed. I couldn’t post that. It was depressing. Even to me. You know what? I’m not the only one who has changed. In some fashion we’ve all changed – some planned, some expected, some surprisingly, some shockingly, some barely. But change we have and like the seasons we will get about 3 months to acclimate to our new normal just in time for the next big (or little) change and we’ll deal with it and wait another few months and do it again.

If we got everything we wanted we would never have a reason to try for something better, we’d never try for more, we’d never wish for something else. Getting what we want is good and fun and satisfying but do we want to be just satisfactory?

So yes, Friday is the first day of summer, or winter, but don’t get too used to it. Like everything else in life the only thing you can count on it to do is change. In a way, that’s actually pretty refreshing.

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Color My World

Michael Leave a comment

First the good news. I’m out of the hospital. Now the bad news. We are in a color rut.

While I was in the hospital my daughter would bring get well cards that popped up in either of our mailboxes. I don’t know about anybody else but I have hard time with cards in the hospital. There’s so little room to begin with and what space is there is loaded with stuff. Hospital stuff. Bags and bottles, water and tissues, and those funny machines you breathe in on to keep you from getting pneumonia. But it was nice to see them, read them, and call the well wishers when I had a few moments. But the cards went back home so they would not be lost or thrown away.

When I got home I had a chance to take them all out and really read them and the notes so many had added. Then my daughter noticed it. “Are they color coding greeting cards?” She had observed, and observed correctly, that the vast majority of the get well cards were contained in yellow or some shade of yellow envelopes. There were also about half as many white, two brown, and one lowly blue card cover.

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Naturally this led to other occasions and what is used to wrap those greetings. Some were easy and unanimous (although with only two of us participating in the survey, unanimity was hardly conclusive). Envelopes for St. Patrick’s Day cards while we aren’t certain why they exist exist in green, usually swaddling a card portraying a drunken cartoon leprechaun or somebody presumably more than a little tipsy wearing beer goggles. Yellow envelopes when not paired with get well cards wrap themselves around Easter cards. Valentines come with red envelopes, Hanukkah cards are festooned in blue, First Communion, Confirmation, and Wedding cards get white envelopes, and Halloween cards, which confound us as much as St. Patrick’s Day cards, are distributed with orange envelopes. And although we’d think a black envelope for a sympathy card could catch on, they always seem to be in a plain white wrapper.

Some cards have standard colors but more than one. Christmas cards can be counted on the be in red or white envelopes with an odd green cover tossed in now and then. Thanksgiving is usually celebrated in brown or other earth tone shade although an orange envelope apparently left over from Halloween may pop up. Baby shower cards have the predictable pink or blue or the unpredictable white enclosure.

And some cards make no sense at all. Although you can almost count on a Mother’s Day card being in a pink envelope, a Father’s Day card might be in almost any color cover. And birthday cards exist with a rainbow of choices of envelope color.

I suppose somehow it all makes sense and although it’s rather formulaic it’s the system we’ve gotten used to. My question is who responsible and if I want to corner the market on Waffle Iron Day cards (which is coming up on May 29) do I have to submit an envelope color proposal before I willy nilly make them maple syrup amber?

 

Lighten Up! (Hospital Style)

Michael

It’s high time to lighten things up around here. Just because I am still, yes still(!) in the hospital doesn’t mean there aren’t things to poke fun at. In fact, much of what goes on around here is worth poking fun at.

So far, nobody woke me to offer me a sleeping pill. Yes it has been done. However I have had the same person offer me a laxative literally (seriously I’m going to use literally as it literally is intended) right after helping me back from the bathroom with … well, you figure it out but Adrian Cronauer would have credited it to a cup of strong cappuccino.

Diets are an interesting phenomenon in hospitals particularly when one has abdominal surgery. You start out with nothing but sips of water. You progress through clear liquids to full liquids to soft and then regular food. All the while each step gets modified to meet your specific health needs like a cardiac or renal or diabetic diet. I have yet to figure out why. When you’re on clear liquids you barely have the strength to left spoon to mouth so that goes right back barely touched. By the time you can eat solid food you’re chowing down on the sandwiches and cookies your family is smuggling past the nurses station and you’re too full to bother with the hospital’s offerings. And their food always tastes bad. You know it’s bad but if you had to describe what is bad about it you find those words have yet to be invented. I’m on Day 17 of this hospitalization so I’ve had some time to think about this. I’ve decided it’s the taste equivalent of when you walk into an elevator and you know somebody was there wearing a cologne more suited to a Turkish whorehouse than anywhere else on earth. So I suspect.

20190610_185905-2You recall my rants regarding remote controls. Too many buttons, too little function! Back in the 70s (yes, I really am that old) nurse call bells were pretty much that. In fact, the first hospital I worked at kept actual bells to distribute to patients in the event of a power failure. Today’s call bell alert mechanisms control lights, television power channel and volume, bed position, sleeping alarms, and might actually summon assistance by way of a two-way radio communication with a disembodied voice from somewhere deep in the building. My particular remote control/Dick Tracy wrist radio gets a lot of abuse pulled across the room, dropped on the floor, and otherwise tortured. This is an absolute true story. All of them are but you are going to say “Oh come on now!” when you read this so just keep in mind, this is an absolute true story. Among other things, my call button controls the room light (button A), controls a reading lamp (button B), controls the TV (TV), and summons assistance (stick figure of some bald dude). I was ready to call it another unsuccessful day and pressed button B to turn the reading lamp off but instead the main room light came on. Checking that I was indeed pressing the right button I tried again and the main light went off. Then I pushed button A because why not and the TV came on. Pressing button A a second time yielded no results so I pressed the stick figure button to report my equipment malfunction but instead of lighting up indicating a call had been initiated, the TV went off and the reading lamp came on. At this point I was back to having the reading lamp on and everything else off. I figured I could fall asleep under those circumstances and left well enough alone. Eventually someone would be in to check my blood pressure and I would report the broken control then.

I could go on with other curiosities like footwear particularly among the anesthesia staff, status boards, and isolation procedures but I might need some lighter topics next week too.

By the way, if I follow you and you haven’t heard a peep from me and are concerned, some sites I can reach through the hospital guest WiFi, some I cannot, and some change day to day. I am better and just waiting for some labs to stabilizer before I can be set free on the world again. I’ll catch up with my required reading then.

We Tried

Michael 6 Comments

I wish I had a happier update to pass along but last Thursday we lost the kidney. We knew we were entering unfriendly waters, weren’t certain it was going to take and had the best team we could want, but the transplant was not meant to be. They all aren’t. Even something with a 97% chance of happening flawlessly has a 3% shot of not working at all. I suppose you could say the long shot came in. I can tell you what happened but people are still working on the why to go with it.

On the first implant, the donor kidney almost immediately picked up color indicating blood was flowing through it. By the following morning blood flow could not be detected and an ultrasound indicated a possible clot in the artery leading to new to me kidney. The decision was made to go back inside me, remove the kidney, clean things up, then return it. This is where we were at the most recent post.

For the next two days, various imaging tests indicated blood flow to be good, marginal, or inadequate – not consistently nor in that order any given time returning any of those results. But laboratory tests indicated an improved renal function. It raised questions. It can happen, in fact it’s not unusual that flow and function decrease or diverge in the first week after transplant. After a week though, results continued to show too much discrepancy between lab function and imaging. After much consultation and while considering risks versus benefits it was decided the only conclusive answer would be achieved by actually exploring the area and physically examining the kidney.

It was found that blood was flowing into the kidney but not through the kidney. The small veins inside the kidney were again clotted, turning the kidney into an anatomical water balloon. The danger of rupture resulting in peritonitis was too great and the kidney had to be removed.

Now that kidney is being examined by pathologists to try to determine the cause. Was there a defect in the kidney making it prone to clot, is there an undiscovered defect in my blood making it prone to clot, or was there a combination of immeasurable or unknown factors resulting in the clots.

The disappointment is huge but the potential is great. If there is something organically “wrong” with that kidney these events might have happened to it while it still resided in my sister potentially rupturing in her and causing her all sorts of untold problems. If there is a defect in my blood it could be that a potential life threatening condition might now be identified and treated. If there is a defect caused by the combination of my blood and her kidney it could that mean future donor and transplant candidates may undergo even more rigorous screening for compatibility.

Some consequences are more immediate. I continue to be hospitalized while I recover from these three operations. As an impatient I’ve received dialysis and my response here will aid in determining if upon discharge I return to dialysis at my pre-surgical order and schedule. My sister will continue her post-operative tests and appointments. I may not have been a successful recipient of her kidney but she was a quite successful donor and will now forever bear the scar of her sacrifice.

So the journey does not yet end. We’ve merely come to the inevitable fork in the road. It might be too early to tell which path to take or it might mean neither path is best but a whole new trail must be blazed. Something good will come from this. It might not be the result that we wanted but “good” and “want” are not guaranteed to overlap. Stay tuned.

Transplant Journey Posts

First Steps (Feb. 15, 2018)
The Next Step (March 15, 2018)
The Journey Continues (April 16, 2018)
More Steps (May 31, 2018)
Step 4: The List (July 12, 2018)
Step 1 Again…The Donor Perspective (Sept 6, 2018)
And The Wait Goes On (Oct. 18, 2018)
Caution: Rough Road Ahead (Nov. 19, 2018)
And The Wait Goes On (Jan. 24, 2019)
A Worldbeater of a Story (March 14, 2019)
Spare Part (May 22, 2019)

Close But No Cigar -Yet (June 2, 2019)

Other Related Posts

Walk This Way…or That (March 9, 2017)
Looking Good (May 18, 2017)
Technical Resistance (May 25, 2017)
Those Who Should Know Better (July 24, 2017)
Cramming for Finals (May 3, 2018)
Make Mine Rare. Or Not (Feb. 28, 2019)
Parts is Parts (May 6, 2019)

Close But No Cigar – Yet

Michael 7 Comments

If things went according to plan this should be Day 5 for me as an official kidney transplant recipient. Actually I don’t know if that’s an official designation. I don’t believe it comes with a membership card or even a secret handshake although it is an ever growing cohort.

I started with that “If things went according to plan” because we have somewhat deviated from that plan. Sometimes things are going to go as well as a textbook procedure, maybe with a minor glitch creating a minor challenge that makes a learning opportunity for everyone. Then there are the things that happen to me.

Sometime last Wednesday a kidney was removed from my donor angel, walked into the operating room next door to that activity, and placed into my body. It was a moment unlike any other. Literally. The organ was a sewn into place, arteries and veins connected, clamps opened, “dirty” blood flowed in and “clean” blood flowed out one way to be recirculation while waste flowed out as urine to its ultimate elimination. It was working! And it continued to work for about 18 hours. Then the reason consent forms came to be came to be realized.

Without getting into the many reasons that could have caused it to happen, partly because specialists are still trying to determine all of the reasons that might have caused it to happen, the blood stopped flowing. I immediately was prepared to return to the operating room where the kidney was removed, arteries and vessels cleaned of some newly formed blood clots, the kidney bathed in an anticoagulant solution, new ties and connections again attached the new kidney to my old body, and then the cleaning process reestablished although at a less than optimal rate.

The kidney was saved, the kidney was working, but to exactly what degree and for how long is still yet to be determined.

As I am writing this samples of my blood are being sent off for examination into why it is clotting at a rate the would not allow the process to be without the corresponding infusion of anticoagulants. Perhaps in another week I can share the reason or reasons and some resolution for it. Until then I can tell you the good things that have happened.

The earth angel who parted with one of her kidneys for me is well and at home already establishing a new normal that remarkably resembles her old normal and doing it much faster than expected, waiting anxiously and praying devoutly for me to to do likewise. Her former kidney is doing its job well enough that I for the first time in almost 3 years lived through a full week without once being attached to a dialysis machine! And we made the right choice of transplant centers where I have never seen such coordination of care and research happening to see that her kidney successfully transitions to being my kidney in its new forever home.

I am walking and eating and generally being a pest to the doctors asking for more freedom of motion, less dietary restrictions, and answers, please more answers. In general, if asked how I am feeling I am clearly feeling better and stronger than a week ago. But I also know I am not yet out of the woods or out of the the weeds or wherever one gets out of when things are not working at their tip-top-pi-est.

I also feel closer to the donor than I have for not just a week but for almost 57 years. That was how long ago the girl who shared her kidney with me was brought home by my parents and introduced to me as my new little sister. Like most siblings particularly a middle and a youngest, we spent many childhood years fighting for attention. Now we are fighting together and discovering even after all these years, new reasons to get our way. Only now finally a common way! Someday soon we will have our answers and we will get our way. How can I let her down?

Transplant Journey Posts

First Steps (Feb. 15, 2018)
The Next Step (March 15, 2018)
The Journey Continues (April 16, 2018)
More Steps (May 31, 2018)
Step 4: The List (July 12, 2018)
Step 1 Again…The Donor Perspective (Sept 6, 2018)
And The Wait Goes On (Oct. 18, 2018)
Caution: Rough Road Ahead (Nov. 19, 2018)
And The Wait Goes On (Jan. 24, 2019)
A Worldbeater of a Story (March 14, 2019)
Spare Part (May 22, 2019)

Other Related Posts

Walk This Way…or That (March 9, 2017)
Looking Good (May 18, 2017)
Technical Resistance (May 25, 2017)
Those Who Should Know Better (July 24, 2017)
Cramming for Finals (May 3, 2018)
Make Mine Rare. Or Not (Feb. 28, 2019)
Parts is Parts (May 6, 2019)

A Prayer for Memorial Day

Michael 2 Comments

SoldiersCrossLord, today we honor the memory of those men and women who have given their lives for their compatriots in the cause of freedom.

 They have worked, fought, and died for the heritage of freedom, brotherhood and honor.

Teach us the true meaning of peace and freedom, that the real battle must always take place in ourselves before it will be won in families and nations.

Make us keep your memory and pray for the peace and freedom of the whole world.

Spare Parts

Michael 8 Comments

I’ve been terribly inconsistent posting but I have a very good reason for that. I’ve been making room for a new kidney!

In the last kidney update from a couple weeks ago I said I was starting the annual testing to remain on the transplant list. Just as I was starting those we got word that we had a live donor match! In fact we had two!!

Since you’ve come along this far on the journey, please join me for this step.

From some posts on a support group page I took it that multiple matches although not common are neither rare. I suppose there could be two absolutely identical donor candidates. More common is the possibility of multiple “perfect marches” with cadaver donors. That would be because with a cadaverous donation only the organ is considered. With live donors, although multiple kidneys might match they are attached to people still using them and their lives rarely perfectly match. Considerations for age, family obligations, location, post-op support, and probabilities of future health issues not uncovered in the donor evaluation must be made. If there still is no decision then they have decide how they will decide. I suppose in the extreme, say if the potential donors are identical twins, they may go as far as a flip of a coin or rock paper scissors. Our donors aren’t twins and they were able to make a determination without resorting to playground games. They got together, made their decision, and notified the hospital.

That decided, pre-op testing began. For the recipient this is the same as the annual testing with some additional lab studies. For the donor, pre-op tests include only a chest x-ray, EKG, a complete metabolic panel lab study, and a complete blood count (CBC). All these can be done within a 30 day window leading up to surgery except for a “last minute” final blood and tissue typing. Last minute would be within 10 days or so of the tentative transplant date.

At this point that date indeed is still tentative. All these tests and studies will be reviewed again by the transplant team. Only after an affirmative from that review is the date finalized. Even then the surgery can be “unscheduled” by any member of the team, the recipient, or the donor.

The surgeries themselves aren’t difficult procedures considering the lifesaving result. The donor operation begins up to an hour before the recipient. In our transplant center this a robotic procedure controlled by two transplant surgeons in attendance. Long before this the decision was made which kidney will be removed. After its removal the renal arteries and veins are shunted to the remaining kidney, the unused ureter is tied off, and the donor goes to recovery.

KidneyWhile the donor’s surgeons are finishing their procedure the recipient’s receiving location is prepared by a second surgical team. The recipient surgery is performed through an open incision and two attending transplant surgeons, in my case one of them also a urological surgeon, will operate. Unless there is a medically necessary reason, the recipient’s native kidneys are not removed. The donated kidney will be placed in an abdominal lower quadrant, usually the right although in my case because of previous surgeries and that space already occupied, it will be placed in the left lower quadrant. The renal vessels and ureter from the native kidneys are transpositioned and the recipient is closed up and sent off to recover.

Typically the donor remains in the hospital 1 to 3 days, often ambulatory the same day of surgery. The recipient’s stay is usually 3 to 6 days, hopefully walking and building up an appetite on post-op day 1. When they go home there are lots of other things that have to happen for both to live healthy, full lives. After all, that is the point of that.

When we get to that point I’ll be sure to keep you up to date in just as excruciating detail as you have become used to. After all, that’s the point of this.

Oh, when will all that be? Well… our presumptive surgery date is next week! I’ll have my last pre-transplant dialysis on Tuesday then eat ravenously because I am ordered nothing by mouth after midnight, every surgery’s first order.

Then, if all goes well I’ll get a new, slightly used spare part. Stay tuned!

——

Transplant Journey Posts

First Steps (Feb. 15, 2018)
The Next Step (March 15, 2018)
The Journey Continues (April 16, 2018)
More Steps (May 31, 2018)
Step 4: The List (July 12, 2018)
Step 1 Again…The Donor Perspective (Sept 6, 2018)
And The Wait Goes On (Oct. 18, 2018)
Caution: Rough Road Ahead (Nov. 19, 2018)
And The Wait Goes On (Jan. 24, 2019)
A Worldbeater of a Story (March 14, 2019)

Other Related Posts

Walk This Way…or That (March 9, 2017)
Looking Good (May 18, 2017)
Technical Resistance (May 25, 2017)
Those Who Should Know Better (July 24, 2017)
Cramming for Finals (May 3, 2018)
Make Mine Rare. Or Not (Feb. 28, 2019)
Parts is Parts (May 6, 2019)

 

 

Uplyfting Moments

Michael 2 Comments

Today’s Word of the Day at Dictionary.com is JOMO. I admit it, that was a new one for me. FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) I think most of us would recognize. MOJO (okay, usually “mojo” as in a magic power) I think most of us might even claim to have! But JOMO, umm, no, I think a lot of us would scratch our heads at that. But then, what do I know? Maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t know JOMO is the Joy Of Missing Out. The Dictionary people define it as “a feeling of contentment with one’s own pursuits and activities, without worrying over the possibility of missing out on what others may be doing.”

In a Psychology Today article (“JOMO: The Joy of Missing Out,” July 26, 2018) Christine Fuller, MD calls JOMO the “emotionally intelligent antidote to FOMO.” In fact, she subtitles her post with that very phrase. She goes on to say, “JOMO allows us to live life in the slow lane, to appreciate human connections, to be intentional with our time, to practice saying “no,” to give ourselves “tech-free breaks,” and to give us permission to acknowledge where we are and to feel emotions, whether they are positive or negative.” Well now, that I’ll buy. But I have to wonder why she didn’t lead with that instead of that FOMO antidote business. That all sounds pretty positive and you don’t have to have feared something to enjoy a human connection, to be intentional with your time, or to feel an emotion.

I’ve not worked at a meaningful, paying (which aren’t necessarily mutual) job since 2014. And if it wasn’t for an occasional foray back into the medical world but as a patient, I’d be even more bored than I have been. I would have loved to experience some additional human connections than the few I would stumble across and be more intentional with my time other than how long it takes me to complete a morning walk where incidentally I would stumble across most of those few human connections. But the boredom aside, I wasn’t unhappy. I certainly wasn’t afraid I was missing something. We used to call that being comfortable in your own skin. I guess BCYOS doesn’t have the same flare as JOMO.

I bring this up because last month I found new joy and it involves human connections and intent and emotions. But I can’t call it JOMO because the word police would question why I’m laying claim to the antidote if I hadn’t acknowledged the fear.  So let’s just say I picked up some work. The folks who would say I’m not experiencing JOMO would call it a side hustle if I had a main hustle to have something to put beside it. Oh yes, we old timers had a phrase for that also. We called it moonlighting. Some people even were audacious enough to call it “a second job.” Yeah, if you look in an urban dictionary it will tell you a component of a “side hustle” is that the hustle is something the hustler is passionate about but I bet a lot of them are just a way to cover a bill or two. And for me it can’t be a second job without a first one going on. It’s just something to do.

Anyway, to make a long story short (I know, too late) last month I entered the gig economy. Or for my generation, I got a part time job. You may have picked up from the many times I’ve come right out and said it that I used to work in health care, specifically in a hospital, that I used to work in health care, specifically in a hospital. I was good. I actually won awards. But I was not a nurse and not an administrator so that means I have the background and experience that no hospital considers valuable enough to bring back as a part timer or an as needed consultant. So I gave up on peddling 30 years of health care management in the “gig economy” and started driving for Lyft. Seriously. And it’s been a very positive experience. Again seriously.

Hailing

To be honest I think you would have to work really hard to make a “real living” driving for a ride sharing company. Fortunately I’m at a point that I don’t have to make any kind of a living out of it. I just wanted something to do when and where I wanted to do it. And if I make enough for an extra dinner out each month I’d be happy.

Also fortunately I live very close to our main airport, many hotels, and lots of corporate offices. I can take two hours in the morning and never drive more than 10 miles from my front door ferrying business people from hotels to meetings and an occasional drop off at the airport. Ninety percent of the riders I’ve had wear suits, like the jazz I always have on in my car (or at least don’t complain about it), carry on pleasant chit chat (yes, yet another term from back then), and sometimes even tip. Obviously I don’t go out on dialysis days and the day after is a 50/50 proposition, but the few morning a week I get out I stay on the road about two hours and pick up 3 or 4 short rides. And that’s enough for what I want. When I want it.

The company and connection with others has been the most uplifting experience. The use of time to actually do something has been a close second. And the extra $100 a week doesn’t hurt either.

Am I’m joyful because I’m missing out on some part of life? Nope. I’m joyful because I’m taking part in it!